[SSI-users] inetd doesn't work correctly with SSI

[John B. <joh...@hp...>]

Let me start by saying that xinetd seems to work fine. Since xinetd is 
the default on Redhat and Fedora, the rest of this shouldn't apply to 
those users. Debian seems to install inetd by default and sees this problem.

When inetd starts a "wait" service for a given port, it stores the pid 
in a short and since our pids require longs, it never recognizes that 
the child using the port has exited and never listens on the port again. 
I found this problem with amanda; it is probably also the reason for 
troubles with tftpd being run out of inetd.

For current Debian users, I recommend installing xinetd on your Debian 
systems. ("apt-get install xinetd" should do it if your /etc/apt/sources 
is setup correctly.) Unfortunately, xinetd doesn't convert your 
inetd.conf to xinetd style entries when it installs, but it does have a 
compatability mode that will cause it to read inetd.conf. Add 
"-inetd_compat" to the XINETD_OPTS in /etc/default/xinetd to do this. It 
is best to reboot, afterwards, to get the daemons started correctly.

Aneesh, for the 1.9.0 release we need to make sure openssi has a 
dependency on xinetd being installed. We should consider scripting the 
setting of the XINETD_OPTS during the installation, but we should really 
only do it if we are forcing the installation of xinetd. I'm not sure 
how to do that. Regardless, we need to add information about xinetd to 
the installation instructions.

John